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- [00:10]
Elizabeth Wood
Welcome to the Design Mind frogcast. Each episode we go behind the scenes to meet the people designing what's next in the world of products, services and experiences both here at Frog and far, far outside the pond. I'm Elizabeth Wood. Today on our show we're talking about building and launching consumer health ventures. To do this, we're bringing you something a little special. In this episode you'll meet the team behind a real collaboration between Frog, the creative consultancy behind this podcast, and Bayer, the global life sciences company with over 150 years of serving customers through pharmaceuticals and consumer health innovation. Bayer's long history and consumer health means they've gotten really good at delivering on what's expected of them as a brand. Scientifically proven, reliable health products easily available over the counter at pharmacies and general stores. But it also means that growing the business means expanding into new territory to serve evolving customer needs. Enter Frog. In this episode you'll hear directly from members of the Bayer and Frog team who collaborated on a corporate venture building program to research, design, test and launch a first of its kind platform for digitally enabled self care in service of healthy aging. The opportunity first came to Frog through our colleagues at Capgemini who have a long standing relationship with the Bayer organization. Listener Note we won't be sharing a lot of specifics about the work itself. Not its many differentiating features, not the years of research that inform the strategy behind it, not even the name of it. We've said it before on this show, but consulting and confidentiality pretty often go hand in hand. But what the team can share with you is why established companies like Bayer are always seeking new models for innovation, ones that might even be disruptive to the very models that have defined them for more than a century and a half. They'll share how digital transformation is challenging everything we know about consumer health and wellness, especially in a post pandemic world, and why corporate venture building is one way of creating something entirely new without jeopardizing the core of your business. We really hope you'll enjoy share with friends, rate and review everywhere you listen. You know the deal. Let us know what you think. We'd really love to hear from you, but first let's get to the story. So let's jump in.
- [02:33]
Dave Evandon Challis
Consumer health is changing in a ton of different ways. The emergence of digital technologies is changing everything.
- [02:41]
Elizabeth Wood
Life sciences giant Bayer came to Frog to build and launch a new venture that uses data dynamics, diagnostics and digital tools to drive better health outcomes.
- [02:51]
Lily Wong
Digital transformation helps us better understand consumer needs and our ability to offer people new products and services.
- [02:59]
Elizabeth Wood
But launching something new takes a new mindset and a new way of working.
- [03:04]
Daniel Kolodji
Ventures is one answer to the corporate growth problem. It's a way of creating entirely new business models and businesses from scratch.
- [03:13]
Ethan Imboden
Corporations come to FROG to help them close the uncertainty and capability gaps. But if you're going to step up to the plate, you need to be intending to hit a home run.
- [03:26]
Elizabeth Wood
In this episode, learn why corporations like Bayer are pursuing ventures that leverage startup methodologies and mindsets.
- [03:34]
Kim Glado
Organizations like Bayer need to find ways to move faster, test faster, to get things out in the market faster.
- [03:44]
Matthias Pilmeier
There are always new technologies, new regulations, new frameworks, new customer needs. And you need to be able as a company to adapt to that with.
- [03:52]
Elizabeth Wood
The ambition of making a real difference for their business, their customers and people everywhere.
- [03:59]
Lily Wong
It's just the explosion of data. There's just so much data out there. A lot of companies like ourselves are still in the infancy stages to figure out how do we store that data and drive some meaningful insights with it?
- [04:10]
Akhil Harjevan
How do we maximize people's chances of getting really better care, better treatment that enables them to live better lives?
- [04:18]
Elizabeth Wood
Chapter 1 A New Approach to Growing.
- [04:21]
Dave Evandon Challis
Old Healthy aging is a big challenge. Aging is something that we're all going to face. We're all going to want to do something about. Whilst there are visible signs of aging when we look in the mirror or when we creak as we are getting in and out of our chairs, there's a lot going on at a cellular level. Hi there, I'm Dave Evandon Challis and I am chief Scientific Officer and head of R and D at bioconsumer Health. In the last couple of years there's been new technologies for people to actually measure their biological age at that cellular level using things like epigenetics.
- [04:55]
Elizabeth Wood
Epigenetics studies the effects that our environment and and our behaviors, like the choices we make about what we eat and how we exercise have on our health. For this program, one of the most important behaviors explored was our relationship with supplements.
- [05:11]
Dave Evandon Challis
We know that one of the key factors that impacts your biological age is nutrition alongside things like diet and exercise, as well as your genetics and lots of other things. So we compare the increasing scientific knowledge about what's going on at a cellular level with the right kind of interventions to develop things like tailor made supplements designed to positively affect the aging process. And in the end, the hope is that we can all manage and measure our aging and take the right steps to stay healthy for as long as we can.
- [05:45]
Elizabeth Wood
Dave sees this focus on interventions as in line with self care trends in the consumer health space more broadly.
- [05:53]
Dave Evandon Challis
We are an aging population now and that is shifting the consumer health industry. We have incredibly stressed healthcare systems all around the world, which means that there's a different emphasis on self care within times. Like Covid, we've seen an uptick in VMs and supplements with topics like immunity becoming very much front of people's minds and linked to that, I think a shift from treatment to prevention within self care, which is really important and accelerating all of this is digital transformation. When you think about Dr. Google, who we all use and the 200 billion healthcare Google searches every year, it's a really important part of self care and I think that's also accelerated by Covid. Post Covid. 60% of people want to use more technology to talk to their healthcare professional. About a third of people are actually getting treatment done at home. All of these things I think are hugely relevant for self care.
- [06:51]
Elizabeth Wood
But innovating in a sector like health brings its set of challenges.
- [06:55]
Dave Evandon Challis
Some of the challenges that we face with innovation are common to others. I think, you know, a hugely competitive landscape at the moment with established players, new startups. The FMCG industry is also getting in on self care as well. So it's a super competitive environment. And innovation moves really fast in consumer health compared to areas like pharmaceuticals, which gives some challenges and some great opportunities as well. And I think finally one of the big challenges is around meeting people's individual needs, but delivering those at scale. That's what big companies need to do, that's what we need to crack. And when we think about more personalized solutions, how do you deliver those at scale for people and work that into your business model? I think if you're a scientist, you love experimenting. And you know, at Bayer we always talk about science for a better life. And over the last couple of years we've been thinking really what does that mean for us, particularly in how we innovate? At Bayer, it's about using science as a differentiator. This is about bringing the science of the human, the science of regulations, the science of discoveries, as well as things like the science of the product experience that we will be delivering and how we collaborate to deliver all of that together. So it's a big innovation machine. We continue to evolve our culture of innovation because the world's changing, so we need to innovate differently as well. And that means an increased focus on partnerships to deliver some of these new things.
- [08:27]
Elizabeth Wood
Chapter 2 nothing ventured, nothing gained Ventures.
- [08:32]
Daniel Kolodji
Is one answer to the corporate growth problem. It's a way of creating entirely new business models and businesses from scratch. It's like turning a page in like a company's legacy and you have a fresh piece of paper that's free of organizational inertia. And if you can imagine being able to create a better or a newer or a different version of yourself, free of all of, you know, the trappings that have slowed down corporates, that's what a corporate venture offers.
- [08:58]
Elizabeth Wood
Yeah.
- [08:58]
Daniel Kolodji
My name is Daniel Kolodji and I'm a product strategy and venture director. I head up the ventures practice here in the uk.
- [09:05]
Elizabeth Wood
Across industries, corporate venture building has surged in recent years as a means for companies looking to augment or even replace legacy business strategies. For Bayer, consumer health, the focus is on building and launching something new that's good for their business, but also good for those committed to healthy aging.
- [09:24]
Daniel Kolodji
What excited me was another opportunity to work in health again, which I think, you know, if you're doing your job right and you work hard, you can potentially make like a really positive impact on lots and lots of lives. Something I think we could all do with in today's kind of chaotic world. I like the idea of working with Bayer specifically, knowing that it's quite a competitive landscape when I think about health tech startups. So having the opportunity to work with an incumbent who's been around and is widely respected, I think was really exciting. I think now because perhaps the barriers to entry in the health tech space have been somewhat lowered via technological advancements, you know, like DNA sequencing, it allows for a lot more innovation and it allows for less upfront R and D and investment to get something out in markets. When I think about early adopters, and I glibly define early adopters as people who are in a lot of pain, who have deep pockets. And when I think about health specifically, there's a literal expression or experience around pain. So I just think that given people want to live fuller, healthier, longer lives, there is a strong consumer desire for that. With a strong consumer desire comes like a strong market demand, and with that comes a lot of competition and innovation.
- [10:42]
Elizabeth Wood
And with a lot of competition comes massive investment. Health tech investment more than doubled in 2021. A Statista study forecast the global digital health market to reach nearly $660 billion by 2025. For Dan, this is where behavioral science has a key role to play in driving real impact in a crowded market.
- [11:03]
Daniel Kolodji
I think behavioural science gives you a really nice humanistic way of understanding what you want someone to do. It's based around, you know, cutting edge understandings of how we work as human beings. I think makes it more interesting, more credible and outside of, you know, the product realm. And I also think that it has the potential to be more potent, certainly when augmented with the other methodologies that we brought to the fore in the program. You're leaning upon your own experience as a practitioner, but I think that is the essence of a venture and a startup. In some ways it's just the best possible guess to get you to finding out whether you're right for real with someone either buying or using your thing. Up until that point, it's purely a theoretical exercise and a way of justifying and directing effort and activity.
- [11:57]
Elizabeth Wood
But getting good answers means asking the right questions and developing the right internal processes for growth.
- [12:03]
Daniel Kolodji
I'm a big proponent of Steve Blank's customer development process. Steve Blank, just for a bit of context, before Eric Reiss and the Lean Startup, there was Steve Blank. He's like the godfather of modern entrepreneurship. You create something that is a representation of something new. You ask people whether they want to buy it or not. That gives you enough information that you know how to change it in the best possible way. And as you start shaping the proposition around the people that you've kind of got half interested, they get more interested, more interested and people start to self select and they give you more feedback and more feedback and before you know it, you know exactly what you should build and the people who've told you to do that are your first customers. And social media, smoke testing, demand testing, wizard of Oz. There's lots of different ways and different labels. That is still a very effective way of doing that customer development process. Growth hacking is misleading because growth is hard, it's an activity and it's a mindset. I don't think there's a quick workaround that allows you to get somewhere quicker with less effort. That isn't what growing a business looks like specifically in a ventures context. It's not about decks, it's not about grand strategies. It's about something tangible, something real or as close to real as you can get within like the risk boundaries of the corporate. One of the key differentiators and key benefits of a corporate venture versus a startup is how you harness that competitive advantage. You know, whether it be consumer insight, routes to market, economies of scale, other in house resources, those things, when honed and used in the right way, can be a real edge against startups.
- [13:47]
Elizabeth Wood
Chapter 3 A Healthy Dose of Digital Transformation Consumer health is really centered around.
- [13:54]
Lily Wong
Proactive Self care management now with the digital devices and trackers out there so that people are actually proactively managing their health because they care about that to stay healthy. There's just so much data out there. A lot of companies like ourselves are still in the infancy stages to figure out how do we store that data and drive some meaningful insights with it. Hi, my name is Lily Wong and I am the lead for digital transformation it for R& D and regulatory, medical safety compliance, function and consumer health. The beautiful thing about the engagement the team did on this project was that we brought together strong digital capabilities. It was a great combination of strategy, creative, meeting, technology. And when this combination is done right, a beautiful thing really happens and you see brilliant ideas can turn into execution rather quickly. With this type of teams forming together, we're really able to de risk some of the digital health propositions that do not necessarily follow the confines of the traditional product development process.
- [14:55]
Elizabeth Wood
There are many variables affecting aging. Many we feel we can impact others that are more invisible or at least feel that way. But if you think about these variables as individual data points affecting our human experience, it's no wonder why consumer health is increasingly looking towards data science as the key to experimentation.
- [15:15]
Lily Wong
We look at all types of data in Bayer consumer health, whether it's quantitative data supplement things around biometrics that you actually have quantifiable metrics coming from some of the wearables, but also qualitative data. And it's around consumer sentiment, you know, also around advocacy for some of the products from the different stakeholders in Healthcare Pyramid. We collect a lot of that data. But the problem is, you know, all this is great, it's real world data, but how do you actually capture the data and be able to turn it into evidence? You see some of the benefits of digital transformation in terms of helping driving some of the internal efficiencies and speeding up processes that actually drive some of this innovation. Not only has digital transformation sped things up internally, the power of data and technology also improves the way we connect with their customers or consumers and stakeholders. So as an example, a lot of the digitization effort through that we're able to connect our product data through the product development lifecycle for innovation. So once we connect that, it's easier to actually improve the way we communicate, the transparency of our ingredients in our products or even our environmental footprint, which ultimately builds trust with their consumers. The other thing I will say is that digital transformation helps us better understand consumer needs and our ability to offer people new products and services. And in some cases it Means offering a new consumer facing digital experience that marries the physical and virtual setting, such as supplementing our physical products that consumers take for self care with an online mechanism for diagnosis care and tracking. And we do it in different ways. We've been able to pilot it with the test and learn methodology, which is a completely new way of actually how do we launch innovations out the door.
- [16:58]
Elizabeth Wood
Along with the right processes? Launching something new often takes the right partnerships.
- [17:04]
Lily Wong
Frog's work that we've done was tremendous and it's a testament of how important external partners are to our innovation. And we oftentimes look external to partners to fill, I would say two gaps or so. One is around expertise and the other one's around capacity. So around expertise we look to partner with others to help us think and act differently, to augment our existing teams with skills and experiences that we don't have innately. The other thing is around capacity. So partnering with others actually require we're able to alleviate some of the bottlenecks that we have internally. We find the right partnerships with the right expertise, plus their ability to flex up and down their teams according to our business demands and the volume of work. It just makes perfect sense, you know, and it takes a while to build these types of great partnerships. So we're in it for the long haul.
- [17:49]
Elizabeth Wood
While in it for the long haul, Lilly feels a digital first approach allows teams to put hypotheses to the test quickly.
- [17:58]
Lily Wong
What's exciting to me is to see the power of digital transformation, how it's taking shape on how we improve the overall innovation process. And it helps us break away from the traditional linear processes and have teams coming together earlier on and to one, generate enormous amount of ideas quicker and two, to de risk some of these ideas working with external partners, they come with a completely new way of doing things and they're not afraid of challenging the status quo or challenging existing processes. You know, a lot of the methodology that we've learned together, we built together. Incubating some of these digital health propositions is something that Frog kind of led us through that some of the early A B testing, from high level concepts, even all the way to the detailed features and functionalities, were able to do it rather quickly using a data driven approach, which sometimes is not innate to our culture. We would basically run experiments and based on the experimental results, we can actually go forward with it or we pivot and fail it faster. So as an example, we would run AB experiments to test a different value proposition, such as a pricing model, you know, and some of the additional services we would offer to the consumers in addition to the physical pills or the products that we offer to them. And we would do these A B testing really quickly to simulate what the desirability of that consumer consumer is. And if it's not, then we can pivot and change and run a different experiment. I'm proud to say that the success that we had through this proof of concept has opened up a lot of eyes internally. There's a lot of energy and momentum around the possibilities of precision health business models across the company that could be relevant and deployed to many countries.
- [19:35]
Elizabeth Wood
We're going to take a short break. When we return, more from the Bayer Consumer Health and Frog team.
- [19:44]
Ethan Imboden
Hi, I'm Ethan Imboden, global head of ventures at Frog. A next economy is taking shape rapidly and unpredictably shifting the operating environment for businesses. Corporate venture building is a bold strategy for growth and resilience in the face of dramatic change. Download Frog's new Chief Challenges Report Venturing forward to find out how to equip your organization for what's next. To engage your teams to move from hypotheses to results and to defy what's possible now to inhabit the future.
- [20:18]
Elizabeth Wood
Now back to the Bayer Consumer Health and frog team. Chapter 4 Pay no attention to the brand behind the curtain.
- [20:26]
Kim Glado
When Bayer was first talking to us about this idea, they kept saying digital platform, but they hadn't really defined what role it really played. And that's a lot of what they were looking for us to help them define. They cared about this platform not just being engagement for the sake of engagement, but really providing real health benefits and outcomes for people that engage with it over time. I'm Kim Glado. I'm a principal designer here at Frog. Our partnership with Bayer in general is that this idea of kind of one size fits all health care is very much over. Most people are looking for health solutions that are quite personalized. To them, it's no longer a, you know, here's a blue pill. Everybody take the blue pill. It's a, here's what you're trying to accomplish, here's what we recommend. Is it working? If it's not, let's adjust. But you don't have to go to the doctor to have that conversation anymore.
- [21:29]
Elizabeth Wood
Before collaborating with Frog on this program, Bayer had invested years of research into healthy aging and consumer behaviors. Now it was time to act on some of these insights.
- [21:40]
Kim Glado
One of the main things that we found in our initial research and that also kind of built on the work that they had already done in their past research phases was identifying some of the reasons that people either are able to and are motivated to maintain a healthy lifestyle and why they may not. So from a behavioral science perspective, a key inhibiting pressure or one of the reasons that people struggle with maintaining a healthy lifestyle was that they were often overwhelmed with the amount of information and guidance out there. Part of the role of the digital platform was to be this vehicle to run kind of a deeper assessment on people.
- [22:28]
Elizabeth Wood
Kim shared that part of the experimentation throughout the design process involved rapid prototyping to test for consumer interest in potential products. Methods like wizard of Oz testing, for example, present consumers with the representation of a product to gauge desirability without giving away who or what is behind the curtain just yet.
- [22:49]
Kim Glado
Part of our goal was to then generate a lot of product offering concepts very quickly and then we translated them into these social media ads that actually went out live on Facebook. And at that point we were tracking metrics like click through rate and cost per lead. And I think that type of data was not only really good guidance for us, but it also provided really compelling evidence for our client stakeholders. So it was an approach to research that they really were fairly foreign to. But we were able to run this test and learn process in just a matter of a couple months. And even after, you know, two weeks of an ad being out on Facebook, you had a good sense of how it was performing and whether it was something worth pursuing. Everything we were creating was really for the purpose of learning. We also had to get into the mode of this didn't actually need to be pixel perfect as much as we maybe wanted it to be, because we were trying to convey an idea and then test what is the attraction of this idea and then how can we build on it to make it more appealing and publish another iteration of it out there?
- [24:10]
Elizabeth Wood
Developing a deep understanding of evolving consumer needs and behaviors is critical for helping incumbents expand into new domains.
- [24:19]
Kim Glado
It used to be that the large corporates kind of dominated consumer health and that's very much not the case anymore. There's a lot of small companies, startups out there that are doing really innovative things and they're able to develop those very quickly with very deep customer centricity in mind. And so I think a ventures approach to a project like this means that ventures really bring some of the messages, methodologies that enable companies like Bayer to invest a relatively small amount of money, but to then learn a lot from it. And that's part of what we were trying to help them do.
- [24:59]
Elizabeth Wood
In this case, chapter five Testing and learning and testing again.
- [25:07]
Matthias Pilmeier
There are so many holistic health experiences out there. Things like headspace, calm, freeletics, all of them, but nothing yet. Regarding the topic aging, it's all more about exercise, it's all more about mental well being, nutrition, all that type of stuff, but it's not really tailor made to your aging journey actually. So my name is Matthias Pilmar. I'm an associate strategy director here at Frog in the design team in Bjnik. We at Frog always convince our clients with narratives, right? But the narratives that we come up with always need to be rooted in data, right? Because we need to sell them a strong opinion. Kim, she always says that we're not in the business of selling the truth, right? Because we can't what we are in the business of selling a solid opinion. And the test and learn approach that we used there was tailor made to that approach, right? Because it enabled us on the one side we have quantitative data, we have qualitative data, but also social media tests, landing page tests. So really gave a strong recommendation of what are the best performing features, what are the most interesting opportunity areas out there, what's the financial value that is in there. And so this test and learn approach really gave us a perfect tool to give a solid recommendation. In the end, what are some strategic decisions that Bayer needs to take to.
- [26:23]
Elizabeth Wood
Help Bayer bring a holistic lens to healthy aging? Matias shared that the Frog team looked closely at quantitative and qualitative evidence throughout to inform the design.
- [26:33]
Matthias Pilmeier
We actually talked to potential customers to understand what are the pain points, what are the hopes aspiration when it comes to the individual agent journey. So that's something that we did together as strategy with the design team. One of the biggest challenges was also that like, does it make sense for a company like Bayer to invest in that space, right? So how much money do you need to put into it? What's the potential financial value they could get out of it to inform then a final decision if it makes sense or not to invest in this specific digital type of value proposition. With quantitative approaches, there's a lot more, I would say, science behind it, right? I mean we have different methodologies like cluster analysis, maxdiff analysis, conjoint analysis, classic correlation analysis, where we really can, with a more scientific approach, say that that's a relevant topic, right? We see some patterns in there, we see some clusters in there around specific values. There's happening something interesting where we then dig deeper into it and also use all the qualitative data that we gathered before to come up then with a unique insight that could provide a value.
- [27:33]
Elizabeth Wood
Regardless of the potential opportunity. A human centered design approach always means leading with empathy to create something with lasting value without getting lost in the buzzwords and hype.
- [27:44]
Matthias Pilmeier
We always, as the nature of designers, we always brought a lot of empathy to the table. Whenever we talk with our customers and potential users, there are always new technologies, new regulations, new frameworks, new customer needs, and you also need to be able as a company to adapt to that. Not every buzzword is a huge opportunity for company, right? Just because some people think we are is important doesn't mean that you need to shift your whole company strategy towards that and jump on that. But as I said, these ventures are a very good methodology to piloting and to just exploring new domains and to test it if it's relevant for you. That's my two cents to that.
- [28:23]
Elizabeth Wood
Swinging for the fences I'm Ethan Imboden.
- [28:26]
Ethan Imboden
And I'm a Vice president of Design and global head of the ventures practice at Frog. Some of the new ventures that we build for corporations can and really should attack the current core business that is actually driving the operating profits of the business today. This can feel really risky to the organization because basically you're having one of your own teams attack and cannibalize your current business. The reality is though, that the outside world just doesn't care and if they're attacking and eating into your current core business, that's just what competition does. So this is sort of the self disruption piece of venture building. But if you're going to step up to the plate, you need to be intending to hit a home run. So you need to be ready to swing hard.
- [29:15]
Elizabeth Wood
Luckily, an organization doesn't necessarily have to self disrupt on their own. It can be a team sport.
- [29:23]
Ethan Imboden
Corporations come to Frog to help them close the uncertainty and capability gaps. What's remarkable and I think really enjoyable for us about this venture work is that it is so broadly applicable across industries and geographies. I think that one misconception about corporate venture building is that it can be well and rapidly accomplished while really being pursued in very small steps without a mandate to see it all the way through. I think what's most critical flipping that around to success is that the team internally to the organization that wants to pursue corporate venture building needs to have a pretty clear mandate to hitting certain key milestones. Some frogs may be sick of hearing me say this, but the only magic that matters is the magic that makes it to market.
- [30:25]
Elizabeth Wood
But even magic takes practice. That's where Validation testing comes in.
- [30:31]
Ethan Imboden
So validation testing is a key tool in mitigating risk in venture building. It is not something that happens only once in the venture building process. It is something that starts from the very beginning and continues in perpetuity inside the new business. One thing to call out about the validation testing work that we did was that we were very fortunate to get such clear results. It's really critical to really choose the appropriate test, first of all, to know what you want, what questions you need to answer, and then secondly, how best to answer those questions in isolation of all the other variables. And what happened in this project was that our results came back pretty black and white around some of the key questions to unlock this opportunity. And that was incredibly helpful in getting a very rapid go ahead immediately following the project for the next steps of the venture build. That isn't always the case. And when it isn't the case, often that means you need to go back and rework, refine, rethink, or abandon the value proposition and new venture that you're looking to build. In this case, the market gave us.
- [31:46]
Elizabeth Wood
A resounding yes, of course, it's always difficult to know when to go ahead with or abandon a value proposition, but according to Ethan, there are some easy ways to spot that you're on the right track.
- [31:59]
Ethan Imboden
When we're looking at building new ventures, there are a number of characteristics that emerge. Category creation, tech interpretation, new behaviors, and convergent experiences. I think what's interesting here with Bayer is that we are in every single one of these spaces. So category creation is introducing a genuinely unprecedented new product or service, which means we need to anticipate how best to guide our audiences in understanding and incorporating it into their daily lives. Now, obviously, that carries pretty naturally over into new behaviors. And so here, a new business model, a new technology, a new product category can help to shift or they can require that we shift our behaviors. And with Bayer, we were definitely looking at behavior change and influence. And behavioral science helps us to reveal how we might influence the promoting and inhibiting pressures shaping how our audience responds so that they can have the best outcomes with our offering. And specifically in this case, it's health outcomes. Tech interpretation is when we look at a new technology and we pose the question, ideally it's a technology that's quite promising, but it's promising for what exactly? How should this be deployed in the market? In what format? How do we productize it? Perhaps for what audience? And how do we introduce that into the market and then scale out to other audiences from there? And finally, that carries us over to convergent experiences, which is where we move beyond the delineations between the physical or the digital or the virtual or the environmental sort of touch points of an offering. And we're really bridging across many or all of those. And we're definitely doing that here. Obviously you're having a physical interaction with the product, but then there is a digital platform beyond that and services beyond that. And we need to orchestrate cohesive experiences that flow naturally across all of these different modes of interaction. So I think it's interesting to look at all ventures, and specifically this particular initiative with Bayer, as having potentially these opportunity spaces, but also the challenges that come along with them. So again, category creation, tech interpretation, new behaviors and convergent experiences, really ripe fields of play. I think that people can only pour themselves into work like this with a good structure for collaboration, so they feel like everybody's pulling in the same direction and their contribution is acknowledged and valued and making a difference. And I think there was huge success on both sides in setting that up and operating in such a collaborative and open manner. I know that the teams on both sides really enjoyed it.
- [34:50]
Elizabeth Wood
The best of all worlds.
- [34:53]
Akhil Harjevan
If we think about how we deliver products today, it's one product that fixes many ailments. And the thinking behind Precision Health is that we really personalize those experiences because something that works for me may not work for you or may not work as well. How do we maximize people's chances of getting really better care, better treatment and and even preventative care that enables them to live better lives? I'm Akhil Harjevan and I lead digital products within Better Consumer Healthcare. Our mindset, when we're developing specific OTC product development, it looks for a problem with a very specific time point. So if I have a stomachache, I want something to relieve my symptoms. If I have a fever, I want that to lower my fever. And it's not so much about the holistic user journey, it's about. And I think that's one of the biggest kind of learnings that we unlocked with Frog was really how can we even hypothesize right around user journeys beyond what we're used to specifically in ailment phase. And then how do we go about collecting data and information to validate some of that thinking with easy connections with people, consumer, and really putting ourselves in that place. Right. And then also unlocking a bit of our thinking in terms of technologies, how we drive tech solutions differently with different parts of the journey so that we're as holistic as we can, end to end.
- [36:17]
Elizabeth Wood
Of course, launching something new doesn't mean being reckless. Maintaining trust and credibility as you grow is essential for any business, but especially in the heavily regulated health and life sciences industry where so much is at stake.
- [36:31]
Akhil Harjevan
We definitely want to leverage the power of our brands, right? Because that's what we've built, built and that's what we're known for, which is also the meaning of trust, the meaning of scientific credibility and credentials. So we also do not want to be the gimmicky partner that all of a sudden is just doing consumer experiences for the sake of them. Right. We really want to be scientific, data driven and actually making a difference for people's health. And that's really our ambition. When we think and talk precision health. And it was our intent with this program as well. I think test and learn is definitely part of it. I see experimentation at multiple levels. Right. Because it is about how we go about validating ideas, putting opportunities out there, launching things that we may not be as comfortable with to learn, but then not kill when they do not perform as well. But how do we learn, improve, iterate and test and learn is definitely a concept that I think we tend to deter from. Not just as bear, I think as human beings, because experimentation is scary, we're scared of failure. We don't like failing at things. And actually people tend to hide their failures. Right. You don't openly talk about or I don't talk openly about when I failed my driving test when I was 18 first. Right. I think we shy away from these things, but this is how we learn. And so it's a bigger cultural shift, I think, beyond a model of testing and learning. I think it's really a cultural shift around opening up for failure, being able to understand it, address it, and then move from that to really drive meaningful and better outputs. I'm from life sciences, so I did biomedical sciences at school. So always a lab guy. Growing up, when you're in the lab, you're on your bench. If things go wrong, if you explode something, no one's really there to call you out. Right. So I think it goes back to that failure mindset and just really being open to it as well.
- [38:34]
Elizabeth Wood
By testing and learning, Akil and team were able to share back the results throughout the team and more broadly within Bayer.
- [38:41]
Akhil Harjevan
It's amazing when you're doing something new, the amount of people that actually run rally behind you to support you. So that was super surprising and actually a really nice experience. Right. We had so many members of our team pitching in, really being involved and really curious to just really understand how we were doing things, how we were driving the initiative and getting it done. So it just shows how hungry I think people are even to this vulnerability, right, to be willing to try things and not so scared of failing. Maybe it takes a lot of work, right, to rally people together and get things done like this. And this is what I think people are hungry for, that there is this misinformation, I think across the industry that the tech world has started doing things in agile ways that are testing and learning and things like that. And people mistake it for being like cutting corners. And that's really not it. And I think this approach really demonstrates that. It's the diligence and the amount of effort and work that you put in when you put people together for three months every day to drive a solution to market and how you validate it. It's what really drives the success and outcomes that you want to then share with the broader organization and with ultimately the external world.
- [40:00]
Elizabeth Wood
Looking beyond the launch, Akil feels there's plenty of reasons to be excited about what's next for consumer health.
- [40:07]
Akhil Harjevan
Listen, it's a super exciting time in the world. Technology is here. I think it's just about us rallying the troops, getting the right companies, partners working together to really move the needle from just treating problems to really predicting, preventing and better managing conditions. Then I think all this data can only empower us to, as an industry to deliver better products, more products that are personalized, that are actually truly efficacious for those who actually don't even get the right care today. Yeah, I mean, it's the best of all worlds, right? Driving real impact by pulling all of these skill sets together. It's what we got to do.
- [40:50]
Elizabeth Wood
That's our show. The Design Mind frogcast was brought to you by Frog, a leading global creative consultancy that is part of Capgemini Inventory. Check today's show notes for transcripts and more from our conversation. We want to sincerely thank the Bayer and Frog team for sharing this story with us. That's a big thanks to the team at Bayer, Dave Evandon Challis, Lily Wong and Akhil Harjivan for joining us. And another enormous thanks to Jeffrey Donald for all the support in making this episode happen. Thanks also to the team at Frog, including Daniel Kolaggi, Kim Glado, Matthias Pilmeier and Ethan and Bowden. If you want to know more about corporate venture building at Frog, check the show notes for a link to download. Our new chief challenges. Report Venturing forward. Thank you to our colleagues at keptgemini and to the whole Frog Global marketing team for their help on this one. Thanks to Senior Copy Editor Camilla Brown for research and story support, and also to Richard Canham of Lizard Media for bringing it all together. We also want to thank you, dear Listener. If you like what you heard, tell your friends, rate and review to help others find us. And be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Find lots more to think about from our global Frog team at Frog Co Designmind. That's Frog co. Follow Frog on Twitter @ FrogDesign and FrogDesign on Instagram. And if you have any thoughts about the show, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out at Frog Co Contact. Thanks for listening. Now go make your mark.